Over a year ago, the UFT submitted a Freedom of Information request for emails between Joel Klein and other top DoE brass, on the one hand, and the leaders of the New York City Charter School Center, the New York Charter School Association, Democrats for Education Reform and other leading supporters of corporate education reform. As it does with FOIL requests that do not suit their purposes, the DoE stonewalled the request. (Take note of the contrast with the DoE’s eagerness to release the Teacher Data Reports.) Last month, the UFT went to court, arguing that the DoE’s continual delays amounted to constructive denial of the FOIL law. Facing the inevitable, last Friday the DoE began to release the emails, sending several hundred to the UFT and the news media. Another 15,000 emails are still to come, so keep your eyes peeled on this one.
Here are some of the highlights of the emails just released. More »
The UFT is has issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) to advance the Collective Impact Model in New York City. The idea behind the model is simple: Make schools into community “hubs” where children and their families have access to all types of programs and services, including health and dental clinics, youth development activities, tutoring, counseling programs, health education programs and social services, just to name a few. By seamlessly aligning all of these important resources into the schools’ daily operations and by engaging the community and bringing in outside volunteers, businesses and organizations, schools are able to address the needs of children in a holistic way — not just in academics, but also in overall health and well‐being.
The Metro New York Labor Communications Council is having its annual convention on June 15, and the lineup is excellent. The morning panel on Occupy Wall Street: Keeping the Message Going will include Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News and Democracy Now!, UAW Local 2110 organizer and OWS activist Mary Clinton, Joe Dinkins of the Working Families Party, and Melissa Ryan of the National Organizing Institute. Nick Unger, veteran labor organizer and author, will moderate.
Lunch and labor communications awards presentation to follow.
If pineapples could speak…
What teachers have been saying for years about the content on state ELA tests has finally resonated with journalists, professors and even the state education commissioner. After 8th-graders voiced their bewilderment over the questions on this year’s infamous “Hare and the Pineapple” passage, Commissioner John King struck it from the test.
Final budget includes money for more teachers
Mayor Bloomberg’s final budget proposal for the coming fiscal year, released on May 3, restores 2,570 of some 6,000 teaching positions lost over the past five years — marking the first time in four years that the city will be replacing teachers who leave.
A schoolwide ‘Movement’: OT-, PT-driven morning program helps Bronx students prepare for learning The magic that gets the school day started in high gear at PS 396 in the Bronx is a schoolwide, early-morning call to action called Movement in the Morning. And in every pre-K to 5th-grade classroom, everyone moves to the music. Teachers join their students for three minutes of jumping jacks, running in place, stretches and extended arm rolls.
UFT protests PEP ‘charade’ at City Hall
Waving signs that read “Support our Kids” and “True Reform Requires Investment,” scores of parents and teachers rallied outside City Hall to protest the mayor’s school-closing policy on April 26, just hours before the city’s Panel for Educational Policy voted to shutter 24 struggling schools, dismiss their staffs and reopen them in the fall under new names. More »
It is perhaps fitting that the Department of Education’s feeble attempt to suggest that their efforts to purge the teaching staffs of the 22 Transformation and Restart schools involve the creation of truly new schools has come to focus on the most ephemeral element — a new name. In the joint meetings, staff, students and community all objected strenuously to the erasure of their schools’ history and heritage, but that means little to the ideologically hell-bent at Tweed and City Hall.
It is worth pointing out that these name changes, following on the closure of 140 DOE schools since the beginning of the Bloomberg era, has significantly changed the names of New York City schools. Pre-Bloomberg, school names reflected the city’s rich heritage of protest and social progress. Now, schools named after trade union leaders, civil rights leaders, democratic socialists, feminists and civic reformers have all had their names stripped from them, one by one, by the corporate reformers:
Trade Unionists: John Dewey, Samuel Gompers, Harry Van Arsdale.
Civil Rights Figures: Benjamin Banneker, Henry Highland Garnet, Martin Luther King, August Martin, Luis Muñoz Marín, Bayard Rustin, Paul Robeson, Dr. Betty Shabazz.
Democratic Socialists: John Dewey, Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, Norman Thomas.
Civic Reformers/Feminists: Jane Addams, Lucretia Mott.
Still alive on this endangered species list? A. Phillip Randolph and Fannie Lou Hamer.
Don’t forget to thank a teacher this week, especially on Tuesday, May 8 — National Educators Day.
In his Saturday Times column, Charles Blow thanks his mother, a veteran educator, and shares some refreshing, common-sense wisdom on teachers and teaching.
She showed me what a great teacher looked like: proud, exhausted, underpaid and overjoyed. For great teachers, the job is less a career than a calling. You don’t become a teacher to make a world of money. You become a teacher to make a world of difference. But hard work deserves a fair wage.
That’s why I have a hard time tolerating people who disproportionately blame teachers for our poor educational outcomes. I understand that not every teacher is a great one. But neither is every plumber, or every banker or every soldier. Why then should teachers be demonized so much?
…
A big part of the problem is that teachers have been so maligned in the national debate that it’s hard to attract our best and brightest to see it as a viable and rewarding career choice, even if they have a high aptitude and natural gift for it.
The release of a new “State of the Sector” report by the New York City Charter School Center will hopefully mark a turning point in efforts to have a more substantive conversation about charter schools’ demographics and performance in our city. As local media have noted, the report is one of the first from within the charter sector itself to acknowledge some troubling data on charter schools that we and other analysts have been discussing for several years.
Specifically, the report found that, compared to the average school in their Community School District in 2010:
68% of charters served a lower proportion of students eligible for free or reduced price lunch
72% of charters served a lower proportion of students with IEPs
96% of charters served a lower proportion of English Language Learners
The report also noted that the charter sector was experiencing significantly higher turnover of principals, teachers, and students than the district:
26-33% of charter teachers left each year between 2007 and 2011, compared to 13-16% at district schools
18.7% of charter principals left each year between 2005-06 and 2010-11, compared to 3.6% at district schools
Charter middle school enrollments shrunk by 5.9% from 2010 to 2011, compared to an increase of 3.2% at district middle schools
Join the UFT and LEGO Education for a day of creativity, teamwork and learning.
Learn how to successfully engage students in science, technology, engineering and math with LEGOs.
Hear how teachers are using LEGO Education solutions in the classroom and about the success their students are having.
Experience it first hand by attending one of the hands-on workshops.
Saturday, May 19
UFT headquarters
52 Broadway, 2nd floor
Morning session for elementary school educators is from 8 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Afternoon session for middle school and high school educators is from 1 p.m. – 5 p.m.
As originally envisioned, charter schools were supposed to be a way of empowering communities to have a stronger voice in decision-making at their local schools — with community leaders, parents, and teachers on the boards and decisions being made in ways that gave stakeholders direct access rather than layers of bureaucracy.
In New York, however, the expansion and oversight of the state’s charter sector seems to be moving in the opposite direction. As evidence, I encourage a review of yesterday’s decision by one of the state’s charter authorizers to allow the Success Charter Network to merge at least five of its schools (and soon eleven, and likely eventually all forty of their schools) under a single board — essentially creating a new school district run by non-profit corporate leadership rather than public officials or local leaders.
If you haven’t heard much news about this plan, it’s not surprising — while the boards of the network’s schools approved the mergers in February, the DOE didn’t have a hearing to get local input on the proposal until this past Friday (with two days notice) — and didn’t release any of the documents explaining what the mergers would look like. More »
At a public hearing at Long Island City HS last Tuesday, April 17, our own Leo Casey was one of many to speak out against the city’s plan to close the school and remove half its staff.
In a major expose, the New York Times has revealed a trail of corruption, bribery and cover-up at the highest levels of Wal-Mart, a leading corporate funder of anti-union and anti-public education projects and initiatives.
The list of 2011 grantees of the Walton Family Foundation, Wal-Mart’s corporate foundation, reads like a veritable who’s who of corporate education reform efforts. Among the more prominent beneficiaries of Wal-Mart money are:
Michelle Rhee’s and Joel Klein’s StudentFirst
Eva Moskowitz’s Success Charter Network
Education Reform Now, the not for profit arm of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER)
The New Teacher Project
Teach for America
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and the state charter school organizations in California, Floria, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, and Ohio
Black Alliance for Educational Options
Center for Education Reform
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Bellwether Education Partners
The Walton Family Foundation has also been a major funder of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, founded by blogger Jay Greene, who has been moved to sing the praises of Wal-Mart on occasion.
As a corporation, Wal-Mart has a long history of flouting American laws: it is the leading corporate violator of childlabor laws, of the Americans with Disabilities Act and civil rights laws prohibiting sex and race discrimination. Human Rights Watch produced a major 2007 report, Discounting Rights, detailing Wal-Mart’s exploitative treatment of its employees, as well as its violations of labor law.
No one has a better take on the now infamous pineapple-hare question than E. D. Hirsch:
“It’s clearly an allegory. The pineapple is the Department of Education. The hare is the student who is eagerly taking the test,” said Hirsch, author of “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know” and “The Knowledge Deficit.”
“The joke is supposed to be on the hare, because the questions are post-modern unanswerable,” he said. “But in fact the joke is on the pineapple, because the New York Daily News is going to eat it up.”
The powers that be at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate funded, right wing outfit that writes model legislation for state and local officials who apparently can’t write themselves, are feeling mighty sorry for themselves these days.
It seems that a confluence of different political events have exposed much of ALEC’s work and political agenda, revealing the connections among a number of their projects:
In the wake of the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, ALEC’s role in writing and disseminating “stand your ground” gun laws which make armed individuals into judge, jury and executioner have drawn considerable public scrutiny, especially after it was learned that Florida officials originally cited one such law as a reason for not indicting George Zimmerman, the man who had shot Trayvon. (Special Prosecutor Angela Corey recently overrode that initial determination, and indicted Zimmerman for second degree murder.) Read Paul Krugman’s takedown. And don’t miss Shoot ‘Em Up Charlie’s story. More »
The new documentary film “Bully,” directed by Sundance- and Emmy-award winning filmmaker Lee Hirsch, will see a wider release starting today thanks to a new PG-13 version that contains fewer expletives than the unrated version that has been screening at handful of theaters in NYC and LA.
The movie follows five students over the course of the 2009-10 school year. Find showtimes near you »
Have you seen the film? Share your thoughts in the comments section.
[Mr. Foteah is the pseudonym of a fourth-year elementary school special education teacher in Queens. He blogs at From the Desk of Mr. Foteah, where a version of this post first appeared.]
As my third graders prepare to take the state tests, I imagine they’re thinking something like this:
I used to love school. I used to skip there every morning after breakfast. I used to run as fast as I could to get to my classroom (except when an adult was in the hall – then I walked as fast as I could).
I used to wait outside the classroom reading a book or finishing homework. When the teacher opened the door, he used to have a big smile on his face, brighter than the sun. He used to say, “Come in and let’s learn together today!” I used to smile back and say, “Good morning!” knowing I was going to have a wonderful day with my wonderful teacher in my wonderful class at my wonderful school.
I don’t love school anymore. I don’t think I even like it anymore, to tell you the truth. I don’t skip there anymore (but sometimes I think of skipping it altogether). I don’t run to my room (but sometimes I want to run away). More »
Highlights from the May 10 issue of 
Join the UFT and LEGO Education for a day of creativity, teamwork and learning.
In a major expose, the New York Times 
[Mr. Foteah is the pseudonym of a fourth-year elementary school special education teacher in Queens. He blogs at 
